After thousands of people have shown that they wish to see Manoel Island become a public park, the PL and PN have already said that this wish is going to be ignored, just as they have been doing for decades, ADPD said Saturday."We are where we are due to the complicity of PLPN with speculators for decades," ADPD-The Green Party chairperson Sandra Gauci said.

Addressing the media, Gauci said that Prime Minister Robert Abela has now realised that it is in his own words 'too costly' to return Manoel Island to the public.  According to the Leader of the Opposition, there is a contract to honour. 

"What they have both forgotten to tell us is that both the Nationalist government and the Labour government have both given in to speculators.  They closed their eyes to the breaches of contract, forgiving their transgressions every time.  As we know, whenever you postpone action, things become more difficult to rectify.  This is why they allowed time to pass without taking action on this public land. Now we have 2,500 new 'luxury units' planned for the market, some on Manoel Island, which will continue to drive property prices up, some on public land.  This is the madness that PL and PN want," she said.

The takeover of Manoel Island started when the PN was in government, with PL complicit in the affair.  Parliament unanimously agreed that Manoel Island would be passed on to MIDI together with Tigne Point.  From what we can see, the leaders of both parties have changed, together with ministers and a change of party in government, but we have remained with the same mentality. 

How can PN and PL keep on giving priority to their donors whilst continuously forgetting those that elected them to power? How can citizens trust those in Parliament, the very ones who voted unanimously in favour of the takeover of Manoel Island?

"It seems that the 29,000 signatures that have been collected have had little effect on the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. They have stuck to parroting the same script in which they apologise for their lack of action when MIDI did not honour the contract," Gauci said.

Whoever has mental and physical health at heart knows how strategically important a public park like Manoel Island is. If the Government truly has the health of the people as a priority, it should not simply be an issue of free gym memberships, but actually actively putting to good use the army of consultants and lawyers it employs to retake Manoel Island, Gauci said.